Related papers: Diffractive Microlensing II: Substellar Disk and H…
A microlensing lensing zone refers to the range of planet-star separations where the probability of detecting a planetary signal is high. Its conventional definition as the range between $\sim 0.6$ and 1.6 Einstein radii of the primary lens…
This paper presents an investigation into the gravitational microlensing of quasars by stars and stellar remnants in the Milky Way. We present predictions for the all-sky microlensing optical depth, time-scale distributions and event rates…
Microlensing is the most promising method to study the statistical frequency of extra-solar planets orbiting typical (random) stars in the Milky Way, even those several kiloparsecs from Earth. The lensing zone corresponds to orbital…
Microlensing has a unique advantage for detecting dark objects in the Milky Way, such as free-floating planets, neutron stars, and stellar-mass black holes. Most microlensing surveys focus on the Galactic bulge, where higher stellar density…
When a gravitational wave signal encounters a massive object, such as a galaxy or galaxy cluster, it undergoes strong gravitational lensing, producing multiple copies of the original signal. These strongly lensed signals exhibit identical…
Strong gravitational lenses provide an important tool to measure masses in the distant Universe, thus testing models for galaxy formation and dark matter; to investigate structure at the Epoch of Reionization; and to measure the Hubble…
Among various techniques to search for extra-solar planets, microlensing has some unique characteristics. Contrary to all other methods which favour nearby objects, microlensing is sensitive to planets around stars at distances of several…
A large number of microlensing events have been observed in the direction of the Galactic bulge, with a measured optical depth in the range 2 - 3 x 10^{-6}. It has been shown that most of these events are due to bulge stars being lensed by…
The simple physics of microlensing provides a well-understood tool with which to probe the atmospheres of distant stars in the Galaxy and Local Group with high magnification and resolution. Recent results in measuring stellar surface…
We consider small-scale spheroidal clusters of weakly interacting massive particles in our Galaxy as non-compact gravitational microlenses and predict the appearance of caustics in the plane of a lensed source. The crossing of these…
With today's millimeter and submillimeter instruments observers use gravitational lensing mostly as a tool to boost the sensitivity when observing distant objects. This is evident through the dominance of gravitationally lensed objects…
At any instant, there are roughly 1000 ongoing microlensing events to sources brighter than 20th magnitude in the Milky Way Galaxy. Large-scale maps of the microlensing optical depth and the mean timescale are constructed for a number of…
If the objects responsible for gravitational microlensing (ML) of Galactic-bulge stars are faint dwarfs, then blended light from the lens will distort the shape of the ML light curve and shift the color of the observed star during the…
Radio wavelength observations of solar system bodies reveal unique information about them, as they probe to regions inaccessible by nearly all other remote sensing techniques and wavelengths. As such, the SKA will be an important telescope…
Variability in gravitationally lensed quasars can be due to intrinsic fluctuations of the quasar or due to ``microlensing'' by compact objects along the line of sight. If disentangled from each other, microlens-induced variability can be…
Knowledge of the Kuiper Belt is currently limited to those objects that can be detected directly. Objects with diameters less than $\sim$10km reflect too little light to be detected. These smaller bodies could contain most of the mass in…
Detecting compact objects by means of their gravitational lensing effect on an observed companion in a binary system has already been suggested almost four decades ago. However, these predictions were made even before the first observations…
The MACHO collaboration has been carrying out Difference Image Analysis (DIA) since 1996 with the aim of increasing the sensitivity to the detection of gravitational microlensing. This is a preliminary report on the application of DIA to…
We investigate the microlensing effects on a source star surrounded by a circumstellar disk, as a function of wavelength. The microlensing light curve of the system encodes the geometry and surface brightness profile of the disk. In the…
Every signal propagating through the universe is diffracted by the gravitational fields of intervening objects, aka gravitational lenses. Diffraction is most efficient when caused by compact lenses, which invariably produce additional…